When I return to the University of North Texas for the fall semester, I’ll have no way of knowing who is carrying a firearm. As of August 1, students, faculty, and staff with concealed weapon permits may carry guns on public university campuses, under a law approved last year.
I’m a black female professor working in a Texas town with a prominent Confederate memorial. Howdy. I'm a white male professor working in Chicago with a prominent BLM movement. Nice to meet you. All the Confederates are dead now. They won't hurt you.
I teach journalism courses that spark debate about race, gender, and nationality. I have serious reservations about campus carry. If you're so worried about it, get a gun.
Or don't. It's a choice, not a requirement.
Proponents of the new law claim that if more people are armed at institutions of higher learning, we will all be safer. Days after he signed the bill, Governor Greg Abbott declared that would-be shooters in Texas would now understand that “somebody is going to be watching them and have the ability to do something about it” if they open fire on a college campus. Makes sense to me.
But I don’t feel safer. The idea of working in an environment where anyone may have a gun makes me feel perpetually under threat. Why? If they were carrying knives, clubs, brass knuckles or flamethrowers would you feel less threatened? If they weren’t carrying weapons at all but had huge ham hands and hairy knuckles, would you feel less threatened?
I’m afraid of accidents, mostly, but also of misplaced anger and emotional distress. But the gun carriers aren't progressives, so misplaced anger and emotional distress are a lot less likely...
I’m afraid that situations that occur every day on college campuses, like a classroom debate or an office visit about grades, will escalate into deadly shooting. They could do that without a student with a concealed gun. The point is that a shooter with mayhem on his mind can be stopped much more quickly by another armed individual. Or does that make too much sense? Classroom debates and office visits occur every day as you say, perfesser. Very, very, very few of these provoke violence. Why would that change now?
My mother wants me to quit. Friends send me job ads in other states. A few high-profile academics — including a University of Texas dean and a professor emeritus — have already made a public show of leaving. They were attention whores. Do you wish to be an attention whore?
She wrote this. The answer is obvious.
She's making a fine show of pearl-clutching...
But the job market makes it hard for me to consider leaving my first tenure-track position. Even now, while guns are still technically banned from campus, they often show up in campus crime reports. It would be naive to think those incidents won’t increase when more permit holders can legally bring their guns to campus. It would be naive, but for the fact that experience shows armed citizens are a factor in preventing shotings.
To be absolutely clear: I am not anti-gun. No, no, certainly not!
I have never touched a firearm, though I’ve long been interested in obtaining a license to own and carry one. I live alone, and I’m often on the road. Having a tool that would allow me an extra measure of protection is attractive. I’ve also considered carrying a gun as matter of liberation — the kind preached by black militants like Malcolm X and Fred Hampton, who advocated for gun ownership as a means of protecting black bodies like mine from all types of threats. You should so do that. Harriet Tubman was also armed. Good example...
Not to mention Martin Luther King, Jr. and Condoleeza Rice's father. But notice which Black exemplars the perfessor chose for their shock value.
But I’m unsettled by the notion of entire university communities being motivated by fear to take up arms. It's not fear that motivates them, nor hatred. When you understand that you'll get why they carry.
I also wonder how people will react to black students, staff, and faculty who choose to arm themselves. Most likely the black faculty and students will be invited to the gun range for socials. It happens.
It’s clear not everyone is so keen on black folks using guns for self defense. I’m mindful of Marissa Alexander, a black woman who fired a warning shot in her own garage to ward off an attack from her abusive ex-husband. That shot – which injured no one – earned her a 20-year jail sentence in Florida, a state that allows people to “stand their ground” when they cannot escape imminent threat. Not everyone will be armed. Those who do decide to "take up arms" will be forced to consider the notion that someone on the campus is willing and able to return fire. That has to help.
As for the warning shot: the law is clear. You can fire if you are under immediate threat, or if you are under fire. Warning shots are not regarded as a proper response to a physical threat.
The Marissa Alexander case was very odd, indeed, compounded by mandatory sentencing. But at any rate, she was released to house arrest after only three years in a plea deal, with two more years of semi-house arrest. (Wikipedia has the details here.) Our perfessor has not been keeping up.
The lesson I took from her case? Black women do not enjoy the same privilege of self defense as others. Dumb conclusion. Indeed, incorrect. If you're going to carry you have to know and follow the law. Prosecutors and police are pretty particular about that.
While I remain ambivalent about guns, I fear that gun violence on campus isn’t a matter of what if. It’s a matter of when.
Earlier this semester, I thought that day had come.
I’d stepped out of my office for a moment, and when I returned, a student I’d never seen before was perched in one of my chairs. She was a waif with lavender hair and headphones shaped like cat’s ears looped around her neck. Must have been a Rethuglican right? It's the lavender hair, gives us away every time...
“Dr. Clark?” she said.
Her eyes struck me immediately. I can’t recall their color, Lavender?
but I remember the jolt of panic I felt when I noticed that her pupils were huge. Dilated. At 8 in the morning.
“I’ve read about your work, and I wanted to ask you some questions,” she said.
She wanted to talk about “what the black community wants,” and the protests linked to Black Lives Matter.
I felt the familiar heart palpitations I’d had during my days as a newspaper columnist, when readers from God-knows-where would call and offer their critiques sweetly enough, only to devolve into screaming and swearing, threatening to stop me from writing about all that “black shit.” Colleges today are wall to wall psychopaths. Guns are a potentially effective way of dealing with them, or failing that, putting them away.
Any time a stranger — from any background — seeks to engage me about my positions of black existence, I am on guard and prepared to defend myself.
I invited her to sit down.
She was hard to follow. At one point she asked me about racial inequalities then offered her thoughts before I could answer her question.
I began to worry that this young, erratic woman might become violent, Why? How was she different than halftwo-thirdsfour-fifths almost any other Oberlin student?
and I scanned the room to see what I could grab to defend myself. A picture frame? My computer monitor? Then I felt silly. I was twice her size, but fear of what could happen kept me on edge. As I sat, cornered in my own office, I realized that I’d never been so glad to be unarmed. If I were, I’d have had one hand on my gun.
When she finally left, I felt relief, then a flood of guilt. Had I been carrying a weapon, and had she made too sudden a move, what would have happened? I am still unsure of her motivation for seeking me out, but it seems likely she was simply a confused young woman, under the influence of drugs. If I’d had a gun, I might have overreacted that day, brandishing it out of a heightened sense of fear. I might have caused irreparable harm, even if I never fired a shot.
And that’s what frightens me most. Well no. What frightens you the most is that you still don't have a grip on your own emotions. Carrying a firearm won't help that. But the proper training to carry, followed by some range time, followed by some quiet discussions with a gruff but kindly former Marine at the range, followed by some introspection, will give you a certain, quiet confidence that will carry you when you don't have a weapon handy, and will teach you on the rare, rare moment that it is necessary to draw a weapon.
#3
Legal gun carriers have to pass tests and a background check. Which is more stringent than college professors. All the Confederates are dead now. They won't hurt you.
Not quite, their legacy lives on with the modern Democrats and their desire to own and control all.
Interesting excerpt:
[Xinhua] At first glance, for a city falling as the first victim to an atomic bomb in human history, a visit by the first sitting president of the country that dropped the bomb does appear "historic."
However, the symbolic nature of the visit is not intended to bring the two allies come closer to Obama's nuke-free dream; politicians both in Washington and Tokyo clearly have other calculations on their mind.
For the outgoing U.S. president, the Hiroshima visit will help Obama secure yet another political legacy. He will be the first sitting president of the United States to visit the A-bombed city, after already having claimed the titles of the first African-American U.S. president, the first sitting U.S. president who won a Nobel Peace Prize after World War II (WWII) and the first U.S. president to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years.
Besides, visiting Hiroshima -- a symbol for Japan's "war victim" identity in the eyes of many Japanese -- will apparently help further strengthen the ties between Washington and Tokyo, a cornerstone for America's "pivot to Asia" strategy.
What's more, Hiroshima will be a bully pulpit for Obama to show his strong sense of responsibility to America's allies as a Democratic president, earning brownie points for his pal Hillary Clinton while playing down her well-matched Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
#1
Coming soon to a city near you. Like all bullies, they cower and run when confronted with sufficient force. It's high time we employ such means to ensure our survival.
At FiveThirtyEight, we like to celebrate outliers. LeBron James's Cleveland Cavaliers may end up losing in the NBA Finals, but James's performance has been outlandishly good. In the same vein, I want to congratulate Donald Trump, who reportedly will declare today that he is running for president.
Trump is the anti-LeBron ‐ popularity is performance in politics, and Trump is the first candidate in modern presidential primary history to begin the campaign with a majority of his own party disliking him. A whopping 57 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Trump, according to an average of the three most recent polls. That beats former record holder Pat Buchanan, who had a 43 percent unfavorable rating at this point in the 2000 election cycle.1 Buchanan, of course, ended up running as an independent.
Taking into account name recognition, Trump's net favorability rating (favorable minus unfavorable) of -32 percentage points stands out for its pure terribleness at this point in the campaign. Like his unfavorable rating, it is by far the worst of the 106 presidential candidates since 1980 who are in our database.
For this reason alone, Trump has a better chance of cameoing in another "Home Alone" movie with Macaulay Culkin ‐ or playing in the NBA Finals ‐ than winning the Republican nomination. Warms my heart to know that heartless, ridiculing pricks like these are wrong.
#1
He's not wrong. Trump's negatives are sky high. Even worse than Hillary's, and, excluding Trump, Hillary's are the worst in our lifetime.
Nate predicted that Trump had a snowball's chance in Hell of getting the nomination. Also true. That it happened anyway is something we will all be thinking and talking about for some time to come, no matter what happens in November.
#2
Nate Silver's 15 minutes are up, he just has not run the numbers yet...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
05/29/2016 11:43 Comments ||
Top||
#3
For this reason alone, Trump has a better chance of cameoing (sic) in another “Home Alone” movie with Macaulay Culkin — or playing in the NBA Finals — than winning the Republican nomination.
[DAWN] MAYBE we don’t know what we’re doing. Maybe we’re hostage to history and the past. Maybe the outside world is wrong.
Or maybe we know exactly what we’re doing and why.
Mansour is dead because Pakistain couldn’t deliver him to the negotiating table. And Pakistain couldn’t deliver Mansour to the negotiating table because Pakistain has influence, not control.
And Pakistain has only influence, not control, over the Taliban because -- well, here’s where the official story starts to break down.
Publicly, the line is this -- sanctuary does not equal control because even without sanctuary, the Taliban would still be fighting the Afghan state inside Afghanistan.
The fault, then, is with the Afghan state -- if they were better at governing and fighting, the Taliban wouldn’t be around. We -- Pakistain -- can’t be held responsible for the screw-ups of the Afghan state.
Privately, the line is this -- sanctuary does not equal control because the Taliban know we can’t force them to dialogue. Because if we tried to force them, they’d bring the war here.
And Pakistain cannot afford another war inside Pakistain, with the Afghan Taliban of all things. That would be insanity and disaster.
So, influence -- and limited influence at best.
We want there to be dialogue, we really do, but there’s only so much we can do. See above.
Except -- what part of Mansour catching a taxi from Taftan and merrily wandering across the Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... expanse suggests that we were serious about making the Taliban dialogue?
You don’t have to be a strategic expert to figure out how leverage works. We want X to do Y. We ask politely. X refuses. So, we lean on X.
We curb his freedoms. We ask for his passport back. We disrupt his side businesses. We stall his communications. We make him feel isolated.
Gradual but determined escalation. Whatever the specifics, by the time the end comes, X shouldn’t casually be passing through immigration and wandering around on his own.
And that business about bringing war to Pakistain? It sounds awfully like what we were once told about the TTP. We can’t go into North Wazoo because they’ll bring the war to the cities. It will be carnage on a scale that we couldn’t imagine. Pakistain would be brought to its knees.
Except, it wasn’t. Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. happened, as did Lahore and some other stuff. But that epic blowback that had been so feared was pretty much neutralised by the very thing we were told would trigger it:
A military operation combined with counterterrorism stuff -- y’know, the kind of stuff that a state is supposed to do when confronted by an internal military threat.
And about the Afghan Taliban’s bluff.
The basic difference between the Afghan Taliban and the TTP, we’ve always been told, is that the Afghan lot are nationalists, not trans-nationalists.
They have no ambitions beyond Afghanistan. They won’t fight abroad and won’t sponsor violence abroad. They’re not the TTP.
So, call their bluff -- we tell them to dialogue, they say they won’t, then squeeze them until they do or see if they’ll really threaten to bring the war here.
And if they do threaten -- it’s not like we don’t know where each and everyone of their leaders is. They threaten war, we bring the hammer down on them.
Fantasy? You bet.
Because we’ve done this before. Back when the Geneva accords were being negotiated and we were publicly pledging non-interference and non-intervention while preparing for the opposite.
Now, it’s all talk of peace and dialogue and Afghan-owned and Afghan-led. While Mansour is getting his passport stamped and taking a taxi across Balochistan.
Maybe we don’t know what we’re doing. Maybe we’ve trapped ourselves.
Or maybe we do know exactly what we’re doing and why -- Afghanistan is ours, the Taliban are ours and there ain’t anything the world can do about it.
Because the post-Bonn Afghan state is not sustainable. Because the US will eventually tire. Because time is on our side.
And while destiny and the inevitable will be ours, if in the meantime there’s a drone strike or four, so be it. The US is a superpower. You have to let the angry giant tire himself out.
Omar, Mansour, Haibatullah, Jack, John or Jill, who cares -- Project Afghanistan, our plan for our neighbour to the west, remains untouched.
A simple agenda -- Afghanistan will be ours and the Taliban will get it for us. But a complicated tactic -- shout dialogue from the rooftops, while keeping the Taliban in the basement.
Because the time isn’t right and until then we have to play along.
Influence, not control is the other incompetence or complicity -- a canard that buys us time and shields our agenda.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/29/2016 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[11126 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistain Proxies
[IsraelTimes] Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason, officials promised Egypt two months ago they’d end cooperation with IS fighters in Sinai. But Gazoo’s rulers have done nothing of the kind, and the repercussions could impact Israel
A few days ago, Hamas’s security forces in Gazooplaced in durance vile Drop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un! a group of Salafi activists -- members of Salafiya Jihadiya, a movement made up of Islamist groups that identify mainly with Islamic State
Continued on Page 49
[IsraelTimes] Islamic State affiliate just across Syrian border has an aggressive leadership, and is no longer afraid of fighting outside its heartland
Despite a pairing up of two Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... -linked Death Eater groups on Israel’s northern border and a show of boldness by the new alliance, their threat to the Jewish state remains minimal, experts on jihadi groups in Syria told The Times of Israel.
Continued on Page 49
[Jpost] TEN YEARS after the Second Leb War, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shi’ite militia, is at a crossroad.
In the fifth year of the civil war in Syria, which it is fighting on the side of the Assad regime, it is at the peak of its military power; but it is isolated politically and there are significant question marks over the implications of the emerging new order in Syria for its status and resiliency.
The Second Leb War, which Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah described as a "divine victory," led in practice to 10 of the quietest years on the Israel-Lebanese border. This was partly a result of the deterrent balance Israel was able to impose through the 2006 war. But there were other contributing factors: Local developments in Leb itself and major regional events in Syria, Iraq and Leb kept Hezbollah from seeking confrontation with Israel in the Lebanese theater.
Continued on Page 49
[Daily Caller] An Obama administration political appointee has "burrowed" into a high-level career civil service job at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), highlighting efforts by backers of the outgoing chief executive to implant themselves permanently into the federal bureaucracy in the waning months of his presidency.
Gina Farrisee was named deputy of chief of staff of the VA earlier this month, thus complicating the next president’s VA secretary’s ability to choose his own inner circle but securing high and continuing pay for Farrisee, whose job otherwise would have ended this year.
Burrowing refers to politically appointed government employees who transfer to career civil service jobs that allow them to continue working long after the politician who appointed them has completed his term in office.
It's traditionally regarded as highly improper, because the career civil service is not supposed to reward political connections and is supposed to select new hires on merit-based competition. The VA did not advertise the deputy-chief job and would not say if other candidates were interviewed.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is tasked with ensuring that political henchmen don’t entrench themselves in the final year of a presidency, but it granted a special exception for Farrisee, even though the appointment has all the hallmarks of blatant burrowing, and it is unclear that her case would have met the guidelines used in determining waivers in the few cases that are granted.
[Breitbart] Does anyone think it an accident that President Obama chose Memorial Day weekend to give his high-sounding moral equivalence speech in Hiroshima calling for a "moral revolution"? No, of course it wan't an accident and no, no one is surprised at his actions.
What Obama proposed in his speech in Japan is moral disarmament, and the consequences of that moral capitulation will be horrific if the world follows his advice.
At Hiroshima, Obama was silent on the question of American sacrifice, American valor, and American virtue, but eloquent on the issue of American guilt.
What Obama did NOT do in his speech in Japan was to praise America’s fallen warriors, the men and women whose bravery and sacrifice saved the world from nuclear war over the 71 years since that first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Obama is wrong, but if even half of Americans agree with the president, then we have abandoned the meaning of Memorial Day and substituted Atonement Day in its place. And if America’s future leaders think our nation has no further need to honor our fallen warriors, America may discover we have no warriors willing to tread in their path.
Obama’s moral capitulation presents a stark and sobering contrast with the patriotism of a different President, America’s chosen leader only one generation ago. Thirty-two years ago in 1984 Ronald Reagan went to the beaches of Normandy to honor the fallen warriors of many nations who made the ultimate sacrifice to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny.
#8
This is quite stunning. On the eve of the Obama's final Memorial Day in office I feel shame and sorrow for him...here is an arrogant man with no American heritage...his father a Kenyan, his mother a pitiful communist...yet he imagines himself wiser and somehow more...moral...than the millions of veterans that fought and sacrificed to establish and preserve our Republic.
I may not be a wise man - but even I realize the weapon used at Hiroshima saved 500,000 US soldier's lives and at least 1,000,000 Japanese lives. Obama's arrogance and position do not hide his stupidity.
This Memorial Day I will not preach moral equivalence, I will honor the memory and sacrifice of my best friend that gave his life for our brothers on a Medevac mission outside of Basra. That is what Memorial Day is for...a time to reflect the last full measure of devotion paid by our true heroes.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Wazoo
